This is what we’ve wrought. An army of men, once virile and vibrant, now wondering if their brains have gone to mush. A game that civilized society knows must be stripped of some of its most debauched violence, even as the same tsk-tskers refuse to look away.

Ancient Rome had its lavish amphitheaters, its afternoon entertainment of humans fighting beasts followed by gladiator matches at dusk. We have our NFL, a spectacularly gory yet entrancing sport that at times sends spectators clamoring for the participants to be mauled or crushed, all in the name of public amusement.

The fallout lands with startling thuds; sometimes it emerges in a slow drizzle. Junior Seau points a shotgun at his heart, the same mode of suicide chosen by Dave Duerson. Other former players stare with dread at the consequences and costs of their profession, fearing what lies ahead.

The results of a far-reaching survey by Sporting News suggest we don’t know the half of it. The brutally honest tales told by some of the 125 former NFL players surveyed, and laid bare in heart-wrenching raw detail by SN reporter Matt Crossman, hint the worst is yet to come.

Of those 125 players, 115 say they suffered at least one concussion, and of those 115, 76 reported dealing with at least one mental-health symptom possibly related to head injuries. Eighty-five of the 125 surveyed admitted to fearing degradation in their mental health; 56 players listed “memory loss” as an ailment. Others dealt with headaches, depression and mood swings.

Repetitive head injuries Greg Koch sustained while playing football across two decades have resulted in a sleep behavior disorder that causes him to violently act out his dreams. The concussions Derek Kennard suffered throughout his NFL career now cause his short-term memory to fizzle, and his inability to recall simple conversations could cost him his job as an educator. Emmitt Smith is one of the lucky few who has yet to experience any symptoms, but if he’s so lucky, why does he fear what the sunrise brings?

It’s an ongoing conversation that has reached the halls of Congress. Is it possible the sport will cease to survive as we know it? It’s dug too deep into the marrow and sinew of our culture to completely disappear; it’s too much of a moneymaking machine to legislate away. But changes in the game to make it safer—and give spectators less reason to tingle with raging froth—might also make it less popular.

This, too, is what we’ve wrought.

Football is hardwired into our society. Examine it from a different angle and the edges appear crisp and clear again. You hear it in the heartfelt cry of the skeptical romantic, a 43-year-old Pop Warner coach named Chris Newell who in high school played against Seau and suffered his share of concussions, yet still can’t shake the sport.

It’s a weekend night in Mill Valley, Calif., a salubrious haven in Marin County just over the Golden Gate Bridge. From every corner comes the hum of a different, supposedly safer activity—hiking trails snake through the hills, bikers seem to rule over automobiles and a vast number of manicured fields dot the area.

So many options are at foot: volleyball, soccer, field hockey, lacrosse (toss up a ball and a league forms around it), and there’s the Bay over there, the ocean a few miles yonder, and good luck finding a citizen in this spot of the world who doesn’t look fresh out of a J Crew catalog.

On the edge of the vast sports complex behind the Community Center, as parents shuffle their children home for dinner and the sun melts into a sorbet swirl, Newell sits on a bench and talks about one of his players, a 10-year-old, who missed the entire season last year because of a concussion, who couldn’t even go to school for months.

Two boys, dwarfed in their pads, wander over to bring the coach a bag he’d left behind. The boys are unfailingly polite, apologizing for interrupting our conversation. I can’t help but wonder what their brains will be like in a decade, whether they’ll be at the cusp of lifelong struggles possibly linked to taking too many hits while playing the sport they adore.

But in one of the many ways Marin County is blessed, many of the roughly 200 kids in Newell’s football programs have access to a fairly revolutionary comprehensive concussion program run by neuropsychologist Eric Freitag that provides pre-injury baseline testing and post-injury care and management. It’s the same baseline test that every NFL player takes; here a child must be 10 to undergo the computerized evaluation that establishes the benchmark of an individual’s brain function.

“Football and other contact sports can be played safely. We’ll never completely remove the risk, concussions are going to happen,” says Freitag, director of the Sport Concussion Program at the Mount Diablo Memory Center. “What’s most important is how we address the injury once it occurs. If we do it correctly, the overwhelming (number of athletes) are going to be fine.”

When a young athlete takes the baseline test before a season begins, it allows for what Freitag calls an “apples to apples” comparison should the athlete experience a concussive injury. The test offers critical ways to assess how the brain is functioning through verbal and visual memory, along with measuring reaction time and processing speed. “Many athletes I see after injury oftentimes minimize the symptoms, not fully admitting headaches for instance,” Freitag says. “But you can’t fake your way through this testing. It can be a shock to see how their brain has been affected by injury.”

The “gold standard” of treatment and recovery, says Freitag, is to minimize cognitive assertion (that means no TV or computer for possibly weeks, also known as childhood purgatory), and severely reduce physical demands until the athlete is symptom-free and cognitive functions have returned to the baseline normal.

“There is no cure for concussions. A second concussion can have far more lasting damage than the original injury itself,” he says. “If we properly treat kids from the get-go, they do recover, often within a week or two.”

While looking through Sporting News’ survey of 125 former NFL players, one theme hovers in the shadows. Each generation had its fallen icons, dead possibly because of what the game did to their brains: Mike Webster for the older guys, Seau for the younger, Andre Watters for those in between.

Who will these boys have? Perhaps nobody if the athletic community learns how to measure the severity and manage the treatment associated with head trauma resulting from a concussion. It can start by eradicating code words such as “sissy” from the playbook. “We have to make sure the cultural shift goes from top to bottom. The coaching staff and the parents have to buy into the shift,” says Newell, the coach who is also the athletic director of the Southern Marin Broncos program. “A child isn’t weak if he complains about headaches. He shouldn’t be told to just walk if off. That’s criminal right there.”

He senses a “trickle down” pattern. Something as simple as the NFL and its players agreeing to tighter restrictions on practice times led to Pop Warner banning full-speed head-on blocking or tackling drills when players line up more than 3 yards apart.

“The refs I know have all been in special training for concussion. The coaches have had to learn to teach a whole new way to tackle,” Newell says. “We’re going to see—we better see—more flags for head-down tackles.” Newell and his coaches point to their helmets: “This is protection,” they tell the boys. They point to their shoulder pads: “This is your weapon. Don’t get it backward.”

But how to keep the kids from wanting to imitate the running loop of dangerous hits they see glorified on TV? Newell mentions that vicious helmet-to-helmet hit Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison laid on Cleveland Browns quarterback Colt McCoy last season, and how McCoy left for all of three plays before returning to the game, and the wide-eyed chatter it elicited from his boys.

Mill Valley’s uniqueness extends beyond access to the innovative baseline testing for young athletes (cost: $20 a child). From inside this bubble it’s possible to sense how football can change and still survive, how youth football, if done right, can even force a shift in how we view the NFL.

It’s also impossible not to notice the immense divide between parents who allow their children to play football and those who consider it right up there with child abuse. Here it’s like Texas has toppled on its side; instead of the culture revolving around Friday Night Lights, large swaths of the community steer clear.

“There’s definitely the pressure not to allow your child to play,” says Lisa Marshall, whose son Ryan is in his first year with the Southern Marin Broncos. “When I tell certain people that he’s playing football, you see their eyes get wide and they say they’d never let their kid do that. Not everyone, but that’s the feeling of a lot of parents around here.”

Ryan happily plays rugby, soccer, baseball and basketball, but he craves football, has for years since he started following the Oregon Ducks. He had to beg his mother to let him sign up for Pop Warner—a scene dozens of parents here told me they had with their own sons, and a scene that is mostly unfathomable in, say, Tallahassee or Omaha.

Eventually Marshall relented, after researching the safety theories and policies of the Southern Marin program. After barely a month of practices she’s witnessed a startling transformation in her son: He’s no longer interested in junk food; even better, he’s taken to heart the truisms Newell constantly lectures to the boys about respecting each other and their parents and the environment that allows them to play this great game. (There’s no finer sight than watching 200 boys pick up litter once the nightly drills have finished.)

She’ll nonetheless hold her breath at games and anxiously wait for Ryan to be old enough to have baseline testing on his brain, just in case.

The relationship between a football culture and its community is complex, anywhere. No matter what Newell preaches, there are still the odd parents who hover on the sidelines, screaming for blood. “Raiders fans,” says one parent, his disdain apparent. “Always Raiders fans.”

Common sense spreads slowly. There are still coaches across America who liken getting hit in the head with having the bell rung, a euphemism that stifles the severity. Barely a decade ago players were considered sissies if they drank water during practice. The forward pass once was considered a weak addition, a crisis that prompted Teddy Roosevelt to proclaim from the White House: “Football is on trial. Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it."

When asked if he’d allow his children to play football, Freitag, the neuropsychologist who’s at the forefront of pushing baseline testing for young athletes, says: “No comment.” Newell, the athletic director and coach, can’t imagine keeping his two boys from playing the game, and has faith that if everyone involved becomes educated about concussions, the sport will survive and thrive.

“What breaks my heart is there’s a really great game that features intelligence and tactics and teaches lessons about strategy and values. Football is still so awesome and beautiful,” he says. “We should work to save it.”